20190620.0430

I've posted six times to this webspace on this date previously, in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2015 strikes me as relevant to some of my present concerns; in it, I muse on going to an outdoorsy store in the City of Thunder's Bricktown and my ill fit for most of what it presents. There are similar stores in and around the Alamo City, and I have been to them--and I have found that I still fit ill in them, years later and in the part of the world where I would seem to belong. And I still muse upon some of the same concerns that I voiced four years ago; indeed, it is not so long a time, four years, even if there are some ways in which the world seems wholly different than it then did.
In and around the City of Thunder, I found a sense of non-identity in many of the people I encountered. That is, they did not seem to know who they were as much as they did who they weren't. Given such circumstances, I understand why many would cling to such shreds of certainty as they did, why they make so much of themselves being such and such kind of person, usually someone who hunts a particular type of game or shoots a particular brand of gun. But I am not such a person, and I have never been one, so I do not share that particular kind of affiliation; not sharing it, I necessarily stood outside, but I did not expect to remain in Oklahoma even as long as I did, so I was not terribly concerned about it.
In the Texas Hill Country, though, there is a much more affirmative sense of self. Texans, generally, know that they are Texans--and that means the Wild West still, but also arts and sciences in plenty, William Travis and Willie Nelson, both. A lot of that identity, though, still links itself to outdoor life, to hunting and fishing and shooting, and I do not do such things much if at all. (I'll occasionally drop a line in, when I have time and inclination, but the former is a rare commodity, indeed.) My heart may sing at a field of wildflowers such that it brings tears to my eyes to think on such beauty, but there are parts of me that still don't fit here.
It's part of why I am so eager to grill when I can (and I can't always, given work and the unusually wet weather this year--not that I'm complaining about the rain, since I know it might not come back for a good long while). Grilling and barbecuing both are time-honored traditions here, taken from others but not unappreciated, and their enactment and performance is something that does allow me to fit in in at least some ways. Given that I have been and remain somewhat anxious about the ways in which I fit, not least because how I fit affects how others are able to fit, it is some source of ease for me that I do.